Chatting with tankerlow is like talking to Spinal Tap before they got big: they’re a bunch of guy pals who love music, getting together to mindlessly rock out. But these guys aren’t fawning over blues rock or hair metal, they’re children of the COVID-19 pandemic experience. Their interests lie in music that makes them, according to Connor Scheff,  “feel like shit (but in a good way).” Trapped in their homes, experiencing their first adult years on Zoom instead of in-person, Guy Azulay, Connor Scheff, and Kyle Norvell found solace in the music of Slint, Swans, and Gilla Band.

The group caught my attention due to how much they sound like Slint's on 1991 album, Spiderland. The sing/speak vocals, droning guitars, and intermittent screaming on their new singles, all veiled by an introverted darkness, felt crisp and clean, as if Slint had been teleported into the 21st century. On the surface it sounded obviously derivative, but something about it still felt authentic and carefully put together. I thought speaking to the band might reveal whether or not this was a young band searching for their sound, or another Greta Van Fleet situation where tankerlow would claim to have never heard of Slint.

I was pleasantly surprised when I asked about their influences: “We're big Slint fans. The band name is a Slint lyric, so we're huge fans.” Rather than hiding their sources, the band wore them proudly, excitedly sharing what they liked and how those acts drive them to make music. It was refreshing to see a band take ownership of their influences and get into details about what they liked.

In our conversation, Connor, Guy, and Kyle shared their favorite bands, the music that inspires them, and how those sounds helped them develop their upcoming debut record, SLAGROOM, which is out September 25th on Danger Collective Records.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tony Le Calvez @ TND: How did the band form? Where'd you guys meet? 

Guy: During COVID, I met Connor through some mutual friends that we have, and we kind of just started to get together and jam out of boredom, and just kind of started to want to make music, and then we kind of enlisted some other friends. We made that first album/EP that we have. And then the two other members that we had beside ourselves had to leave. And we enlisted. Kyle here to be our newer member, and that was, like…January 2024. Yeah, and we've just been this crew since then.

What's kind of everyone's background with music individually?

Connor: My dad's a musician, so I kind of grew up around it. We always had, like, a little studio space for the most part growing up, so I mean, I was banging on shit since the beginning.

Guy: Same for me. I was just doing a lot of stuff by myself. So to join this band and be able to play with people, finally, it's been a wonderful experience.

Connor: But similar, yeah, my dad is in the industry and always had a little space at home to kind of cook stuff up, but my brother would drum, so when I was, like, 5, I tried to learn how to drum poorly.

Guy: Kinda always played music, I learned guitar in middle school and stuff, but never really took anything seriously, like, never took any lessons, and then I think, like, COVID time, I kinda just started to play a lot more. Like, this is my first experience, like, making music with anyone besides, like, making really bad SoundCloud demos and stuff that no one should ever hear. 

Connor: Look his SoundCloud up and listen to all of them! They're sick as fuck! 

Guy: No…

Did you have experience recording, or at least, messing around with recording equipment before you guys got together to work on this project and record as a group?

Guy: Yeah, like, a little bit when, when we first met.

Connor: We would jam in this, like, office building that my dad was renting out. I had Ableton for probably, two years before that, but was fucking around on it, not really taking it very seriously, and just making, like trap beats, and just fucking around with my brother, he makes music as well, and he just has, like, a bunch of these weird synths and fucking drum machines. Around a year after me and Guy met was when I really started to take it seriously. And then I met some friends from my brother, who kind of put me under their wing and showed me the recording ropes.

Guy: Yeah, I had no experience. I mean, I tried to record at my house, but refused to learn how, so like…

Connor: Basically, we just wing everything, and it all sounded really bad.

Guy: I had…the, like, Chromebook equivalent of GarageBand, and some mics at home that I would mic everything up with one mic, and then, yeah, sounded awesome. Oh, it's called Mixcraft. Yeah, I had the free trial version.

Do you guys feel like one of you guys is kind of the ‘head guy,’ at least, in the studio, or does the engineer you work with typically take over the reins of where you're going creatively in the producing?

Guy: Well, Connor is our engineer, so he spent the last few years just learning. Our last album we did, he did engineer most of it, but we sent it off to get mixed and stuff. And a lot of it was like we were all kind of just  trying to figure it out. I think Connor really locked in for this last one, and he did everything himself. He mixed, mastered– he did all of it. It's pretty balanced, though while we're working. It's definitely a group effort when we're writing and tracking and everything, because we kind of just record as we go, like, our process is not very traditional. This little studio space that we work out of doesn't really have a jam room. We've kind of been doing the, like, come up with something cool, loop it on Ableton, come up with another part, loop that, and then kind of slowly build songs out piece-by-piece on the computer, rather than traditional: write a song, play it, and then record it.

Have you guys played this material live yet?

Guy: We've played one song out of the new stuff, but we haven't played a live show in almost two years.

If you write everything as you come up with it and track it, how do you imagine adapting that into a live format? And is playing live something y'all wanna do, or do you wanna stay as a studio band?

Connor: Like Guy said, we have a very bedroom producer way of writing music and recording it, and with that came a lot of freedom, so there's some songs with twelve guitar track. Like, there's five different parts playing at once, so it's definitely been a learning process to figure out how we're gonna play these songs. 

Guy: It's gonna be a big band. There's another guy coming to play guitar, we have a modular synth player, and then we got a drummer to come and play with us as well.

Connor: Yeah we'll be six deep on stage.

Do you have a tour planned?

Guy: We just have our release show for the album, that's the only one that we have currently, but the goal is to definitely try and plan some kind of tour, or maybe see if we can get an opening slot for someone. But we definitely do want to play, like, that's a big thing, but we kinda got pretty tired of playing the other stuff that we had once we started writing the new material, because we thought it was just a much better representation of us musically. So we kind of took a break, and we'll start playing once we have this new setlist that we can play more confidently.

Do you see yourself putting any of the old stuff in that set list, or just moving on from it?

Connor: Knock it out. We'll see–- maybe a song or two every now and then. The first album was, like– there's some songs on there that I hold very close to my heart. We put songs on that project for the sake of putting it on because it was one of the first things we wrote.

What are your short term goals for the band? What are the next coming months looking like with the album coming out, and what are you guys trying to get done?

Guy: We just put out a single today. It's the third single and then next month is kind of like a grind month for us. We have the album coming out, and then a couple days before it our focus track. It's kind of the last single and we're pretty proud of that song, so we're gonna really try to just push. We're about to film a music video for that one in the next coming weeks. Yeah, I don't know, I think we're just gonna try and get it as far as we can with the tools we have at our disposal. But then after that, at least, speaking for myself, I would love to focus on live performances and dial us in as a live band. It would be awesome to just play shows as much as possible, and see where we can go with this new stuff.

Connor: Over the past year it became something way greater than I think I could have ever imagined, you know? I always thought that the music was too niche to be something great, but when we released the first single, it got picked up by a couple playlists, and just became something far greater than I ever expected. So whatever it is, I'm kind of stoked on. I would love to play, but I feel like the dream is to open for a band that inspired the record.

What are those bands right now? What's a band you'd love to open for?

Connor: Gilla Band! Gilla Band is like for sure, one of the top inspos. That was the one that was on repeat for, like, the whole record. It still is.

Guy: Also, Psychotic Monks was a big one. We were listening to a lot of Queens of the Stone Age, like, the first album…

Connor: It was, like, Gilla band, Psychotic Monks, Queens of the Stone Age and Chavez. Shout out Chavez

Guy: What else? I feel like there's a big one we're missing.

Kyle: Swans. 

Guy: Yeah, Swans has always been a good one.

Connor: I mean, we still have some Slint inspo. The first album was basically, like…

Guy: We're big Slint fans. The band name is a Slint lyric, so we're huge fans.

Connor: If they ever come back, please, we'll open for free. That was the thing that me and Guy bonded on. That's kind of what started the whole thing, is we just both kind of just got into the whole, post-rock, Slint, like– just got into all that and wanted to make it. 

How long you guys been listening to them?

Connor: I mean, we probably — I mean, I found out about it probably like — 

Guy: 2019, 2020. 

Connor: During COVID, yeah.

Great COVID album. Just kind of make you feel like shit all the time.

Connor: Yeah. In the best way. COVID was a great time to just, like…I think my taste in music just completely shifted when I was locked in my room. Yeah, that's when you get into all the 20-minute droning Swan songs, you have nothing else to do, and you just go, fuck, I'm in it.

He said, how can we also make people feel horrible while listening to music?

Do you find it tough to balance finding time for this music project, outside of your lives?

Connor: I'll find time. 

Guy: Yeah, that's kind of been the thing. It definitely has been a bit crazy for me recently, just… I have a bunch of shit I'm working on, all at the same time, so the last few months have been a bit hectic for me, but it's been okay. It's nice to feel like I'm working on stuff and be busy, you know?

Connor: Whatever I'm doing outside of it, I'll for sure find a way to make time.

Is there anything about your project that you’re most excited about?

Guy:I think we've been really excited about visuals. I think that was something we didn't really have prior to the release process of this album, and then…I don't know, we kind of just like, been thrown into another, creative outlet for us. It never really was part of our thing, having a visual aesthetic or planning videos and stuff. But recently it's been pretty fun and inspiring to make.

How much control do you have over the creative direction of these videos?

Connor: Pretty much complete. We're working with, we're working with a videographer who's pretty willing to experiment. We'll just try to do what we want, and he offers ideas, and we either, you know, like them or don't like them.

Guy: Yeah. For the most part, we have all the control, as far as what actually gets put out. And he's a risk-taker, too, which is sick. Yeah. This last video…the song's eight and a half minutes, and the video was shot one take, zero hidden cuts, which is sick.I would say also the live aspect, too. I think the show's gonna be pretty intense, and loud as fuck. There was a pretty visceral feeling seeing JRCG, Swans, and Gilla Band that I would love to just to try and achieve.

When's your next show?

It's October 12th at Zebulon in LA, free show, Monday night.